Author Lynn Freed, who was "celebrated for her mordant and keenly observed novels, short stories, and essays," died May 9. She was 79. Freed "captured in fiction and memoir her elegant father, her fiercely ambitious mother, and their theatre company and exuberant household in Durban [South Africa] in the 1950s and 1960s," according to her obituary, which noted that the "texture of home, the longing to leave and the yearning for the world left behind, and the fraught relationship between the writer and those who fed her imagination were among the subjects she explored with exquisite honesty and a finely tuned voice."
"The real world of my childhood," she wrote, "a large subtropical port on the Indian Ocean, with beaches and bush and sugarcane and steaming heat, a strict Anglican girls' school, massive family gatherings on Friday nights and Jewish holidays, and then my parents' theatre world... this world did not exist, not even peripherally, in the literature available to me."
Freed was the author of seven novels, including Heart Change (1982; republished as Friends of the Family in 2000), Home Ground (1986), The Bungalow (1993), The Mirror (1997), House of Women (2002), The Servants' Quarters (2009), and The Last Laugh (2019). She also published a collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man (2004), and two volumes of essays: Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home (2005) and The Romance of Elsewhere (2017).
Freed first came to the U.S. as a high school exchange student with the American Field Service, then returned in 1967 after graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She earned a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. As a teacher of literature and creative writing, she was Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis and also a member of the core faculty of the MFA program at Bennington College.
"We are all deeply saddened by the news of Counterpoint author Lynn Freed's passing," Counterpoint Press posted on social media.
Narrative magazine posted: "We’re mourning the death of Lynn Freed. Recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and as well as two PEN/O. Henry Awards, Lynn published many stories and essays in Narrative and each is a gem, marked by her singular voice and spirit."